Ch.13
The practice sword caught me across the ribs and I went sideways.
I stayed up. That was new. Three sessions ago, that hit would have folded me. Now it drove me two steps to the right and I kept my feet, turned the momentum into a pivot, and came back with a cut that missed her by a hand's width. She batted it aside without looking.
"Better," she said.
Dawn training with Ais had developed a rhythm over the past week. Show up before sunrise. Stretch in silence while the sky went from black to gray to pink. Spar until one of us called it, which was always her, because I would have kept going until my arms stopped working and she knew it.
I'd improved. She knew that too.
The first two sessions had been her tapping my openings at a pace slow enough to teach. By the third, she'd sped up. By the fourth, she'd stopped correcting my grip between rounds and started testing it instead, sending combinations she'd never used in training before, checking whether my hands held.
This was the fifth. And she was different today.
"Again," she said, and came at me at a speed I hadn't seen from her in training before. Full extension, the practice sword cutting air where my head had been. I ducked, rolled, came up swinging. She deflected, advanced, and her footwork shifted from the methodical teaching pattern into full-speed combat, fast and alive.
She was sparring for real.
I knew her fighting style. That was the advantage I couldn't explain and couldn't afford to think about too carefully. I'd watched her fight in the anime, the elegant minimalist swordwork her father had passed down, lower body stable while the blade moved in arcs that looked choreographed. Which shoulder dropped before a horizontal slash. Her pivot direction on the recovery. The tell in her elbow before a feint. I'd watched those sequences on a screen in another life, and my body had absorbed the knowledge even if I hadn't been trying to memorize them.
I shouldn't have known any of it. A Level 1 with five training sessions didn't read a Level 6's patterns. But the foreknowledge was there, baked into my instincts, and when she came at me with a combination I'd seen her use against a Minotaur on Floor 37, my body was already moving.
I dodged the first strike. Sidestepped the second. Blocked the third with a parry that shouldn't have worked at my level.
Ais stopped.
Her sword was still extended. Her eyes were on me and her head was tilted and her brows had pulled together. A single crease between them and a stillness in her body, like a system that had received an input it didn't have a category for.
"How did you do that?" she asked.
"Do what?"
"The third one. You moved before I committed. You read the feint."
"Lucky guess."
She adjusted. Came at me again, and this time the pattern was new. A descending slash followed by a hip-level sweep that transitioned into a thrust. I didn't know the sequence. My body didn't have a prediction for it.
The sweep caught my thigh and I stumbled. The thrust would have spitted me if she hadn't pulled it at the last instant, the wooden point stopping an inch from my stomach.
"Not lucky," she said. Her voice was flat, but her eyes hadn't settled. That focus she usually saved for the Dungeon.
"Some of your patterns," I said. "I can read them. The new stuff, I can't."
Her mouth compressed. "How?"
"I'm observant."
She held the look. Then she reset her stance.
"I'll use new patterns," she said.
She did. And she stopped holding back.
The first new combination started with a low feint I almost fell for. The sword dipped toward my knee and I shifted to block it and she was already coming over the top with a descending strike that caught my shoulder and drove me back three steps. Before I recovered, a lateral cut crossed the space where my chest had been. I'd twisted away by instinct, D-rank Agility doing the work my brain couldn't keep up with.
She came again. A thrust that converted into a sweep that converted into a rising slash. Each move flowed from the last without a reset, without a pause, her feet barely making sound on the packed earth. I blocked the thrust, dodged the sweep, and the rising slash caught me across the forearm hard enough to make my fingers go numb. The practice sword almost fell. I caught it, switched hands, kept moving.
She pressed. A straight lunge I sidestepped. A horizontal cut I ducked. Then a reverse grip backhand I'd never seen her use in any fight or any training session I'd watched. It clipped my jaw and my teeth cracked together and my vision went white.
I stumbled back. Spat. Tasted copper.
She paused. Her eyes went to my mouth.
"Continue," I said.
Her chin dipped. She came again.
The next stretch was the hardest thing I'd ever done in this body. She hit me. Ribs, arms, legs, a crack against my shoulder that killed the feeling in my whole arm. I didn't go down. I tightened my grip and kept moving and tried to make her work for every hit. Once, I caught her on a recovery and my practice sword touched her hip before she knocked it away. She blinked. It was the first time I'd landed anything on her in five sessions.
She was faster. Stronger. Five Levels above me. But she was also studying me while she fought, testing edges, probing responses, and there was a precision to her attacks that told me she was calibrating. Finding the exact line where I broke.
She found it after a long string of exchanges I'd lost count of. The combination was too fast to track. My sword left my hand and my shoulder hit the packed earth and then she was on top of me.
Her forearm across my chest. Knee on my left thigh. Her practice sword pinning my right wrist to the ground. She was breathing hard. I was breathing harder. Her weight was on me and her face was close, the flecks of darker gold in her irises sharp in the morning light, individual strands of blonde hair loose from her tie, the fine layer of sweat on her collarbone where her battle cloth had shifted during the sparring.
She wasn't getting up.
Her eyes moved across my face. Down to where my shirt had pulled open, the collar dark with sweat. My jaw. My mouth. Back to my eyes. She was studying me, but the methodical part of it was slipping, her attention catching on things that had nothing to do with swordsmanship.
My chest was heaving under her forearm. Her breath hit my face in warm, even pulses. She smelled like metal and clean sweat and the faint trace of soap from her hair.
I didn't say anything. I didn't look away.
Her lips parted. A fraction.
Then her eyes went wide. She pulled off me in a single motion, standing, turning, her back to me. Her hand went to her ear.
Red. Both ears. Dark, obvious red, visible from behind against the gold of her hair.
"We... should stop for today." Her voice had the same flat tone as always. Her ears disagreed.
I sat up. My ribs ached, my wrist was bruised, and the warmth of her forearm was still there across my chest like a line drawn on my skin.
"Sure."
"Your footwork improved." She said it to the crenellations. Her shoulders were rigid. "Your stance is cleaner. Your reaction time is..." She stopped.
"Is?"
"Confusing." She picked up both practice swords. Her back was still to me.
A sound from the wall behind us. A crunch. Apple.
"Ais, your ears."
I turned. Tiona Hiryute was sitting on top of the outer crenellation with her legs dangling over the fifty-foot drop on the other side, eating an apple. Medium-length black hair, dark green eyes, a tube-top that left most of her midriff bare, barefoot. Her feet swung back and forth in the open air. She was grinning.
Ais's hand flew to her ear again. She pressed her palm flat against it.
"They're not-"
"They're super red." Tiona took another bite. "Like tomatoes. The good kind." She looked past Ais at me, sitting on the ground with my shirt plastered to my chest and dust in my hair. "Hey. You're the guy from the pub, right? Bell?"
"Yeah."
"I knew it." She pushed off the crenellation and dropped down to the training ground. The drop was six feet and she landed like she'd stepped off a curb. "Ais never trains with anybody. I've asked, like, a hundred times. She always says no." She glanced at Ais. "She said yes to you?"
"She did."
"Huh." Tiona bit her apple again, studying me. Her eyes lingered on the practice bruises blooming on my arms, the sweat-soaked shirt, the general state of someone who'd been used as a Level 6's practice target for an hour. Her grin widened.
Ais was walking away. Fast. She had both practice swords under one arm and her other hand was still covering her ear and her stride was longer than usual.
"Ais, wait up!" Tiona called. No response. Ais reached the stairs and went down them without looking back.
Tiona watched her go. Then she turned back to me, still grinning. She had apple juice on her chin and didn't care.
"You're pretty fun," she said. "I like heroes. People who get knocked down and stand back up." She looked at the impression in the packed earth where I'd been pinned. "You stood back up a lot."
"It's all I've got."
She laughed. Loud, sudden, the kind that came from somewhere deeper than politeness. A pigeon on the crenellation startled and flew off.
"I'm Tiona." She stuck out her hand. I took it. Her grip was firm and warm and she pumped my arm with a cheerfulness that could have broken bones if she wasn't careful. "You seem like a hero. Like the kind in stories."
"I'm Level 1."
"So? Argonaut was Level 1 when he fought the bull." She let go of my hand and looked out over the crenellation at the city below, the morning light warming the rooftops. "Everyone starts somewhere. The good ones just don't stop."
She tossed her apple core over the wall. It arced out and disappeared.
"See you around, Bell." She vaulted the crenellation after Ais, dropping out of sight.
I sat on the training ground for a while. The morning sun was warming the packed earth and my shirt was drying and my ribs were going to bruise in patterns that Lili would notice and Hestia would fuss over and Eina would lecture me about.
My jaw ached where Ais had clipped me. I probed the inside of my cheek with my tongue and found the spot where my teeth had cut it. The taste of copper was still there. I leaned back on my hands and looked at the sky. Clear, getting bluer as the sun climbed. A bird circled over the eastern quarter, riding a thermal, going nowhere in particular.
Ais would figure out that I knew too much eventually. She was too smart and too focused for the pattern-reading to slide forever. When she ran out of new combinations and started recycling, I'd start predicting again, and the gap between what a Level 1 should know and what I actually knew would get wide enough that she'd stop asking politely.
I didn't have an answer for that yet.
I stood up. Shook out my arms. Headed for the stairs.
I had Dungeon floors to clear and a supporter who was planning to rob me and a goddess who was going to want a detailed explanation for these bruises.
And a sword princess whose ears turned red when she pinned me to the ground.